Google Cloud Contact Center AI (CCAI) from Bell is now generally available for Canadian businesses.
Introduced at Google Next as “the first fully AI solution” for Bell’s midmarket and enterprise customers, the offering pulls together Google’s virtual agent, agent-assist, and conversational intelligence tools.
Bell will work with its clients to customize and deploy the suite across cloud contact centers of any size and on-premise operations looking to leverage the tech in a hybrid environment.
The organization announced a similar deal with NICE in 2021, offering CXone to its customers. However, this goes further, as Bell will also implement the solution across its own contact center operations.
Indeed, Bell Canada will deploy Google’s complete CCaaS platform – the Google Contact Center AI Platform (CCAI-P) – encompassing the three elements of the CCAI offering and much more.
By doing so, the organization aims to improve the service experience for its huge B2B and B2C customer base – with the latter including over 13 million wireless internet subscribers.
Moreover, Bell strives to gain experience that will help guide its Canadian clients with their own Google CCAI deployments and integrations.
As Sam Sebastian, VP of Google Cloud Canada, summarized:
By utilizing Google Cloud’s CCAI, Bell Canada can both transform their own contact center operations and help their customers increase customer satisfaction, improve agent performance, reduce costs, and improve operational efficiency.
Alongside assisting tech deployments, Bell Canada supports clients with end-to-end managed support – from identifying the best-fit communications solutions to mapping out and optimizing their impact on customer journeys.
The business also aids customers in evolving their workforce engagement management (WEM), change management, and agent experience optimization strategies.
“We are thrilled to move forward in our strategic partnership with Google Cloud to offer CCAI to our customers,” added Michel Richer, SVP of Enterprise Solutions, Data Engineering and AI at Bell.
“By deploying these products internally, our Professional and Managed Services teams are gaining extensive knowledge and expertise to support our customers effectively throughout the digital transformation of their contact centers.
With reduced agent training time and tools to support improved sales outcomes, Google CCAI through Bell aims to turn what is traditionally a cost center into a revenue generator.
Earlier this year, Bell won the “Google Cloud Sales Partner of the Year – Canada” award, underlining its expertise within Google Cloud environments.
Now, it adds Google CCAI solutions to its Contact Center Practice, which Bell claims has a “track record of successful premise and cloud contact center implementations.”
Yet, the story also underlines another significant coup for Google’s CCaaS business – with yet another enterprise deploying the CCAI-P and sharing its base elements amongst its deep client base.
That comes after the tech giant shared several CCaaS megadeals with CX Today in February.
However, it has seemingly saved many more of the big announcements for this week’s Google Next – where CCaaS is now playing a central role.
Discover Financial Services Brings Google GenAI to 10,000 Contact Center Agents
Elsewhere at Google Next, Discover Financial Services shared how it had teamed up with the tech juggernaut to bring generative AI (GenAI) to 10,000 contact center agents.
Its deployment focused on building two GenAI use cases into Discover’s internal agent tool, Action. The use cases are intelligent document summarization and real-time search assistance.
Intelligent document summarization utilizes Vertex AI to analyze and summarize long-tailed policies and procedures, allowing agents to share quick insights when responding to customer queries.
Meanwhile, real-time search assistance leverages natural language to proactively serve agents relevant information during a live interaction, so they don’t have to search and switch various apps for insights.
Early results show that these use cases have helped agents reduce average handle time (AHT) and lower policy and procedure search time by up to 70 percent.
Discover also discovered that the results translated into “significant” CX and productivity gains.
“Today, more than ever, customers expect exceptional service, and our collaboration with Google Cloud will help us not only meet but also exceed those expectations,” added Szabolcs Paldy, SVP of Operations at Discover.
By using Google Cloud’s generative AI tools, we will raise the bar for customer support interactions, ensuring fast, personalized, and effective service every time.
Diving deeper, Discover trained and tuned Google’s large language models (LLMs) with a set of FAQs – created by a set of experienced agents – before building the LLMs into their contact center solutions.
An automated acceptance tool then ran hundreds of test cases – across various parameters – to isolate the right responses with the highest scores for accuracy and safety.
In doing so, Discover could better manage the risks of GenAI and deliver timely information to agents.
“Discover is committed to responsible AI use with adequate risk management,” said Shaun Khalfan, SVP and Chief Information Security Officer at Discover.
Our approach to the use of AI technologies follows rigorous risk assessments and ongoing monitoring to ensure our AI systems operate ethically and responsibly.
Discover now plans to build upon the existing use cases within Action to help with call transcription, intent analysis, and customer sentiment tracking.
Also, Discover aims to infuse its internal CRM systems with Vertex AI to increase customer intelligence.
All this is possible because Google allows businesses to build their own GenAI-powered applications on top of its Vertex AI platform, cloud infrastructure, and Data Cloud.
Within the Vertex AI platform, a Model Garden allows businesses to plug in open-source and third-party AI and GenAI models – alongside Google’s first-party offerings.
Those first-party offerings include a curated set of models that Google uses up the stack, too.
Google also recently extended the capabilities of the Vertex AI platform so businesses can tune, distill, and evaluate the performance of their models – in addition to hosting and training them.
Some of those new features are on display within Discover’s story, with Google Cloud praising the organization as a “leader in the application of AI within the financial services industry.”
Interested to know how other brands are deploying GenAI in the contact center? If so, read our article: 20 Use Cases for Generative AI In Customer Service
